Android: I love you, but fragmentation is bringing me down

I’ve been a pretty big fan of Android for a long time now. Having an open-source mobile operating system that different OEMs can experiment with and customize to their liking has been a huge boon to the tech world and has ensured that Apple (AAPL) won’t have a monopoly on popular smartphones anytime soon. But as Google (GOOG) has refined its operating system over the years and added some great new features, it’s become increasingly hard for me to ignore that fragmentation of the platform is a serious problem that hasn’t gotten any better.

Writing over at The Guardian, Charles Arthur notes that Android 2.3 Gingerbread is still by far the most widely-used version of Android in the world right now despite being released nearly two years ago. And to make matters worse, Arthur says that although three different versions of Android have been released since Gingerbread first arrived in late 2010, Gingerbread has been much slower to decline in use than previous outdated versions of the operating system.

“What that adds up to is that unless something changes quite dramatically in the next couple of months, Gingerbread will remain the dominant Android version for quite a while,” Arthur says. “It’s only losing a couple of percentage points per month, while [Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean] gain about the same. With a 30% gap between the old and the new variants, it could take another year before things changed.”

This is incredibly annoying, and it points to problems on Google’s end for a couple of reasons:

First, the big selling point of Ice Cream Sandwich was that it was designed to be the first version of Android to deliver the same experience across multiple form factors, from smartphones to tablets to “phablets,” thus reducing headaches for app developers worried that their app might look different on various screen sizes. Which is wonderful, but if you can’t get your grand unifying Android update out to a majority of Android devices in a timely fashion, then what’s the point?